My bookshop being closed today as it is Thursday I went
bookbuying in Faversham, Herne Bay and Margate, three towns with five
secondhand bookshops between them, this type of day which culminated in my
winding up painting in Turner Contemporary Art Gallery’s café leaves me
thinking that something must be done about the Thanet town centres.
As I sketched a bit more of the view in Margate the news
came through that Margate Caves has been awarded a further million plus in
funding and will open in 2019. I think part of the problem with Margate town
centre, is Turner Contemporary itself, the current exhibition lacks any
conventional work of art which could be a draw for conventional people with
conventional money.
By this I mean that when we had – for instance – our Trace
displaying sketches of blue women inserting something blue where the sun don’t
shine this was offset by having Rodin’s Kiss. There is nothing of the order of
The Kiss in the gallery at the moment and the visitor numbers seem very low –
apart from the café and the loos that is.
I see in the offing we have Phyllida Barlow, Michael
Armitage, I hope these will be crowd pullers, but have my concerns. I also feel
that as the gallery is mostly publicly funded with a fair chunk coming out of
the council tax there is some responsibility to pull in the crowds, to make the
shops work.
The gallery has had a good run recently with Grayson Perry
and JWM Turner Adventures in Colour, but they need to keep it up.
All of these following pictures were taken in Margate in 1903
for the the first book with lots of photographic adverts, useful for dating old
Margate photos and I recommend you come into my bookshop here in Ramsgate and
give it a browse in conjunction with the Margate street directory for that
time. If you can’t get to Rmasgate easily here is the link to buy it online http://michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/margate_and_westgate_with_birchington_1903_04.htm
For the dedicated followers here is the link to the books that
went out in my bookshop yesterday http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/mr-benn-in-bookshop.html
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.